Global Internet Outage As Some of World's Biggest Websites Go Offline

Several major websites around the world including Amazon, Reddit, the U.K. Government website and multiple news outlets crashed on Tuesday morning.

It appears likely that the crashes have been caused by issues at Fastly, an internet content delivery network used by many major websites.

Downdetector, an online service that collects reports of crashed websites, has shown a sudden spike in crashed website reports across dozens of websites.

Some of the websites that Newsweek has attempted to access, like Reddit, have loaded only partially with only simple text displaying.

Others had failed to load at all. News website CNN and the U.K. Government website both displayed an Error 503 message.

Google Trends data shows that search queries for Error 503 spiked sharply at around 6 a.m. EDT.

The errors do not appear to be localized. Reports have come from Australia, North America, the U.K. and Europe, and China over the past hour.

Error 503 indicates that a service is temporarily unable to handle a request, perhaps because the server is overloaded or down for maintenance.

Even apps appear to be affected, with reports coming through that Spotify is not working as it should.

Fastly first identified issues to its content delivery network (CDN) services just before 6 a.m. EDT this morning. By 6:44 a.m. ET the company said it had identified the issue and said a fix was being implemented.

At 6:57 a.m. ET it stated: "The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return."

Other websites and services known to be affected include, or have included, The Guardian, PayPal, eBay, TechRadar, Target, Etsy, and Vimeo.

Some of these now appear to have regained service.

Update 6/8/21, 7:15 a.m. ET: This article has been updated to include information on Fastly's service updates.